Adriana Duque

Adriana Duque

Artist Adriana Duque practices a photographic mannerism in which she explores staged social landscape realities. Her photographic "pictures" are mis en scenes of her own inspiration, in which the common denominators are the encounters and contrasts between high Western culture and its myths with the spatial and social dystopia of her own country. The photographic images of her work allude to painting, theatre, literature and the cinema. The silence in painting, the light in cinema, the immediateness of theatre and the superficiality of advertisement images can be perceived through these images; they are fictitious performances staged for the camera and subsequently constructed in the computer that result in a claustrophobic and hermetic world of illusion and wonderment.

There is a constant confrontation between realism and fantasy in the images produced by this artist. What is real, they reveal, can only be captured in its essence by simulation. The idea is authentic and the image is the fiction. Although she seems to demonstrate the contrary, her work is not endowed with a specific narrative but rather develops on the basis of a series of suggested actions: more based on the implications of the image than on description of it. The contents of these multiple layers suggest structures of comprehension –sometimes too bizarre to be real– which ultimately reinforce the sense of suspicion and intrigue they arouse in viewers. Just as in the work of other contemporary photographers, scenes in her work are filled with subjective meanings, in which every symbol is charged and each connection, perverse. This emphasis on the psychic role ends up producing the opposite effect, and the elaborate symbolic structure fatigues coherence and suggests the impossibility –or negation– of believing in the organization principles of the characters and the story.

In the work of Adriana Duque we recognize by way of positive knowledge what has not been relegated for sure to the past by images and historical stereotypes of culture and identity; her photographs maintain this obstinate state since they hunt our memory; precisely because it is given to us by omission.